You cannot be at the table, so the flowers stand in, and out here the table is at the end of a driveway. Siobhan and I did our own deliveries from 2006 to 2009, and on a 2008 birthday run off the Tweed Valley Way, three driveways shared one mailbox post. I picked the wrong one twice and explained myself to a very patient bloke on a ride-on mower. Valdora Road is the same shape of country, so the notes take the driveway and a mobile.

Anna's call: chrysanthemum or lisianthus holding the middle of a birthday bunch; the bestsellers are built that way.

The address in the notice is a property. Yandina Cemetery, on the corner of Cordwell Road and Central Park Drive, is the old monumental ground for this valley, and in our experience a tall vase does not sit on a plot there. A sheaf does. Nothing you send fits the size of it, and people still remember who sent something.

Whites, creams and soft greens for the kitchen table. For a plot in full sun, a funeral sheaf of woody natives from the sympathy range, wired low against the wind.

Someone from Valdora is on Hospital Road and you have a ward name off a text. From what our florists have seen, Nambour General flowers go to the ward reception desk and a nurse carries them in, so the ward and the full name go in the notes. "Thinking of you. Hope you're on the mend." does the card.

Anna, on ward flowers

A shared room did not ask for scent. Unscented Asiatic lilies, gerbera and chrysanthemum went into every hospital arrangement I put together, boxed so nobody hunts for a vase.

Half the orders into a place like this fit no heading: a neighbour who fed the horses, a mate gone quiet, a mum who moved out here. You do not need a category. Anna has a view on this.

Send Asiatic lilies. Each bud opens on its own day across a week on the bench. Pinch the anthers off as they open; dry pollen bonds to a tablecloth, wet brushes straight off.